Joseph Romm – The IPCC lowballs likely impacts with its instantly out-of-date reports and is clearly clueless on messaging – should it be booted or just rebooted? And should IPCC chief Pachauri stay or go? – Climate Progress, 18/02/2010 – http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/18/ipcc-lowballs-impacts-pachauri-disband/“The consensus-based process in which every member government signs off on every word in the synthesis reports leads to a least-common-denominator set of statements that further waters down the science.”

George Monbiot – There is climate change censorship – and it’s the deniers who dish it out – The Guardian, 10/04/2007 – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/apr/10/comment.georgemonbiot“For months scientists contributing to the IPCC tussle over the evidence … This means that the panel’s reports are conservative – even timid. It also means that they are as trustworthy as a scientific document can be.”

Key Scientific Developments since the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report – Pew Center for Global Climate Change – Science Brief 2 – http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/Key-Scientific-Developments-Since-IPCC-4th-Assessment.pdf“The AR4 did not examine any research published after July 2006. In the years since then, a significant body of new peer-reviewed science has been published, much of which is relevant to policy decisions … The AR4 concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are responsible for most of the increase in global average temperature with greater than 90 percent certainty (IPCC 2007a). Numerous recent findings explicitly link other aspects of climate change to human activities: Rosenzweig et al (2008), Gillett et al. 2008, Min et al. 2008).”

Katherine Richardson et al (2009) – Synthesis Report from Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions – University of Copenhagen, Australian National University, ETH Zürich, National University of Singapore, Peking University, University of California – Berkeley, University of Cambridge, University of Copenhagen, University of Oxford, The University of Tokyo, Yale University – International Scientific Congress Climate Change – http://www.climatecongress.ku.dk – Peer reviewed“Recent observations confirm – the worst case IPCC scenarios are being realised. For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the bounds of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived. —- There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts”.

Reasoning Backwards at the George C. Marshall Institute – PR Watch – http://www.prwatch.org/node/8395“In September 2001, the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington D.C. think tank, appointed Matthew B. Crawford as its Executive Director. At the time, the think tank boasted that Crawford had “won numerous academic fellowships, including the Bradley Fellowship, The H.B. Earhart Fellowship, and the University of Chicago Century Fellowship; he was the John M. Olin Postdoctoral Fellow in the Committee on Social Thought.” The think tank, which has long promoted the work of prominent climate change skeptics, claims that it provides “unbiased technical analyses on a range of public policy issues.”

Stephen Schneider (2009) – The Climate Crunch: The worst-case scenario – Nature 458:1104-1105 doi:10.1038/4581104a – 30/04/2009 – Peer reviewed“Many will argue that warming above 6.4 °C is unthinkable. Unfortunately, when I talk to analysts or economists such as Weitzman, I am told that it is precisely the warmer endpoints that they want us to examine further to alert society to catastrophic outcomes that are more than 5–10% likely to happen. This is a probability that is way above the threshold at which people usually buy insurance, or for department of defence deterrence strategies … The number and intensity of abrupt events and the possibility of irreversible damages goes up non-linearly with warming.”

Stephen Schneider – Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Schneider“His research includes modeling of the atmosphere, climate change, and “the relationship of biological systems to global climate change.” Schneider is the founder and editor of the journal Climatic Change and he has authored or co-authored over 450 scientific papers and other publications. He was a Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group II IPCC TAR and is currently a co-anchor of the Key Vulnerabilities Cross-Cutting Theme for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). During the 1980s, Schneider emerged as a leading public advocate of sharp reductions of greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming.”

Rick Pilz – Climate scientists tell House committee: We know the risk, now it’s up to policymakers to act – Climate Science Watch, 21/05/2010 – http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/details/house-climate-science-and-politics-hearing-20may2010/“The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing on May 20 to examine the intersection between climate science and the political process. Ralph Cicerone, Mario Molina, Stephen Schneider, Ben Santer, and William Happer testified. The committee also heard testimony about the recent rise in vitriolic attacks on climate science and scientists. The Republican members made opening statements that attacked some more, then walked out on the hearing without even listening to the testimony, or asking a single question.”

Paul A.T. Higgins (2008) – Carbon cycle amplification: how optimistic assumptions cause persistent underestimates of potential climate damages and mitigation needs. An Editorial Comment – Climatic Change doi 10.1007/s10584-00 – 23/06/2009“Biological systems constitute a critical, but sometimes overlooked, component of the climate system because they influence key physical characteristics of the land surface and atmosphere …Unfortunately, it’s difficult to include these feedbacks accurately in climate projections because future responses of vegetation are hard to constrain using past observations and field experiments.”

Veerabhadran Ramanathan and Y. Feng (2008) – On avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system: Formidable challenges ahead – Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS 105:14245-14250 doi:10.1073/pnas.0803838105 – 23/03/2008 – Peer reviewed“Even the most aggressive CO2 mitigation steps as envisioned now can only limit further additions to the commited warming, but not reduce the already commited GHGs warming of 2,4 ºC.”

Gerard H. Roe and Marcia B. Baker (2007) – Why Is Climate Sensitivity So Unpredictable? – Science 318:629-632 doi:10.1126/science.1144735 – 26/10/2007 – Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington – Peer reviewed“We show that the shape of these probability distributions is an inevitable and general consequence of the nature of the climate system, and we derive a simple analytic form for the shape that fits recent published distributions very well. We show that the breadth of the distribution and, in particular, the probability of large temperature increases is relatively insensitive to decreases in uncertainties associated with the underlying climate processes.”

Benjamin M. Sanderson (2007) – Towards constraining climate sensitivity by linear analysis of feedback patterns in thousands of perturbed-physics GCM simulations – Climate Dynamics 30:175-190 doi:10.1007/s00382-007-0280-7 – 03/07/2007 – Peer reviewed“Linear predictors of feedback strength from model climatology are applied to observational datasets to estimate real world values of the overall climate feedback parameter. The predictors are found using correlations across the ensemble. Differences between predictions are largely due to the differences in observational estimates for top of atmosphere shortwave fluxes. Our validation does not rule out all the strong tropical convective feedbacks leading to a large climate sensitivity.”

Julian L. Simon (1983) – In defense: The Ultimate Resource – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – September 1983 – Peer reviewed“The key idea here is measurability, if a magnitude cannot be measured or counted, it is properly said to be infinite. I shall try to show that the relevant quantities of resources – including energy – that may be available cannot be counted, either in practice and in principle, and then scientific usage would properly regard them as not finite … everything hands on choosing the appropriate context of meaning, and the appropriate system of analysis with a sensible boundary.”

Lewis Powell – The Powell Manifiesto – Thid World Traveller – 23/08/1971 – http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Neoliberal_Economics/Lewis_Powell_Manifesto.html“The two essential ingredients are (I) to have attractive, articulate and well-informed speakers; and (ii) to exert whatever degree of pressure — publicly and privately — may be necessary to assure opportunities to speak … But the basic concepts of balance, fairness and truth are difficult to resist, if properly presented to boards of trustees, by writing and speaking, and by appeals to alumni associations and groups.”

Mikael Höök et al (2010) – Validity of the fossil fuel production outlooks in the IPCC Emission Scenarios – Natural Resources Research 19:63-81 doi:10.1007/s11053-010-9113-1 – June 2010 – Uppsala University, Global Energy Systems, Department of physics and astronomy – http://www.tsl.uu.se/uhdsg/Publications/IPCC_article.pdf – Peer reviewed“It is found that the SRES unnecessarily takes an overoptimistic stance and that future production expectations are leaning towards spectacular increases from present output levels. In summary, we can only encourage the IPCC to involve more resource experts and natural science in future emission scenarios. The current set, SRES, is biased toward exaggerated resource availability and unrealistic expectations on future production outputs from fossil fuels.”

Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen (2008) – Implications of “peak oil” for atmospheric CO2 and climate – Global Biogeochemistry Cycles 22, GB3012 doi:10.1029/2007GB003142 – NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute – 17/03/2008 – Peer reviewed“Assuming that proven oil and gas reserves do not greatly exceed estimates of the Energy Information Administration, and recent trends are toward lower estimates, we show that it is feasible to keep atmospheric CO2 from exceeding about 450 ppm by 2100, provided that emissions from coal, unconventional fossil fuels, and land use are constrained. Coal-fired power plants without sequestration must be phased out before midcentury to achieve this CO2 limit.”

Ross Garnaut et al (2008) – Emissions in the Platinum Age: the implications of rapid development for climate-change mitigation – Oxford Review of Economic Policy 24:377–401 doi: 10.1093/oxrep/grn021 – Australian National University – Peer reviewed“Making adjustments to 2007 World Energy Outlook projections to reflect more fully recent trends, we project annual emissions by 2030 to be almost double current volumes, 11 per cent higher than in the most pessimistic scenario developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and at a level reached only in 2050 in the business-as-usual scenario used by the Stern Review. This has major implications for the global approach to climate-change mitigation. The required effort is much larger than implicit in the IPCC data informing the current international climate negotiations. Large cuts in developed country emissions will be required, and significant deviations from baselines will be required in developing countries by 2020. It is hard to see how the required cuts could be achieved without all major developing as well as developed countries adopting economy-wide policies.”

Referencias adicionales

Suzanne Taylor Muzzin – Global Temperatures Could Rise More than Expected – NASA Earth Observatory – 20/12/2009 – http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=42184&src=eorss-manews – “The kinds of increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide taking place today could have a significantly larger effect on global temperatures than previously thought, according to a new study led by Yale University geologists. Their findings appear December 20 in the advanced online edition of Nature Geoscience. The team demonstrated that only a relatively small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) was associated with a period of substantial warming in the mid- and early-Pliocene era, between three to five million years ago, when temperatures were approximately 3 to 4 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today. Climate sensitivity—the mean global temperature response to a doubling of the concentration of atmospheric CO2—is estimated to be 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius, using current models. “These models take into account only relatively fast feedbacks, such as changes in atmospheric water vapor and the distribution of sea ice, clouds and aerosols,” said Mark Pagani, associate professor of geology and geophysics at Yale and lead author of the paper. “We wanted to look at Earth-system climate sensitivity, which includes the effects of long-term feedbacks such as change in continental ice-sheets, terrestrial ecosystems and greenhouse gases other than CO2.”

Margaret S. Torn and John Harte (2006) – Missing feedbacks, asymmetric uncertainties, and the underestimation of future warming – Geophysical Research Letters 33, L10703 doi:10.1029/2005GL025540 – Earth Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley
“The warming of 1.5–4.5°C associated with anthropogenic doubling of CO2 is amplified to 1.6–6.0°C … Thus, anthropogenic emissions result in higher final GhG concentrations, and therefore more warming, than would be predicted in the absence of this feedback. Moreover, a symmetrical uncertainty in any component of feedback, whether positive or negative, produces an asymmetrical distribution of expected temperatures skewed toward higher temperature. For both reasons, the omission of key positive feedbacks and asymmetrical uncertainty from feedbacks, it is likely that the future will be hotter than we think.”

Joseph Romm – Memo to IPCC: Please reanalyze ALL of your conclusions about melting ice and sea level rise – Climate Progress, 18/01/2010 – http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/18/science-ipcc-melting-ice-himalayan-glaciers-2035-sea-level-rise“It isn’t news that the 2007 projections by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are not accurate. The real news is that the 99% of their “mistakes” are UNDERestimates of likely impacts. Indeed, they lowballed the sea level rise projections so badly that even the Bush administration rejected them within a year (see “US Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections).”

Martin Sommerkorn – A Closing Window of Opportunity-Global Greenhouse Reality 2008 – WWF International Arctic Programme, 2008“The emerging evidence is that important aspects of climate change seem to have been underestimated and the impacts are being felt sooner. For example, early signs of change suggest that the less than 1°C of global warming that the world has experienced to date may have already triggered the first tipping point of the Earth’s climate system – a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean. This process could open the gates to rapid and abrupt climate change, rather than the gradual changes that have been projected so far.”

Joseph Romm – Something else for the deniers to deny: The ocean is absorbing less carbon dioxide – Climate Progress, 15/01/2009 – http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/15/something-else-for-deniers-to-deny-ocean-absorbing-less-carbon-dioxide/“The scientific reality based on actual observations (not to mention the paleoclimate record) is that the climate models are not underestimating negative feedbacks — the models are wildly underestimating the positive or amplifying feedbacks. Among the greatest concerns is the growing evidence that the major carbon sinks are saturating.”

Dan Kammen – Climate scientists debate with prime minister – Environmental Research Web, 19/05/2009 – http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/opinion/39126“The worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized … There is no excuse for inaction … we find that past warm climates were significantly underestimated by models … The two big challenges of this century are fighting world poverty and managing climate change. And we succeed or fail on those two together …”

Jonathan Amos – Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’ – BBC News San Francisco, 12/12/2007 – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm“Professor Maslowski: My claim is that the global climate models underestimate the amount of heat delivered to the sea ice by oceanic advection … Professor Peter Wadhams: In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly. It might not be as early as 2013 but it will be soon, much earlier than 2040”

Stefan Rahmstorf (2010) – A new view on sea level rise – Nature Reports Climate Change doi:10.1038/climate.2010.29 – Professor of Physics of the Oceans at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research – 06/04/2010http://www.nature.com/climate/2010/1004/full/climate.2010.29.html“Has the IPCC underestimated the risk of sea level rise? – Whether the response of continental ice to warming is well represented by empirical models is harder to judge, though the linear dependence on temperature is similar to that also used in glacier modelling studies and by the IPCC. The semi-empirical approach, however, was recently criticized in the popular media (ref) on the grounds that it is, to a large extent, calibrated to the past glacier contribution, and that glaciers would be “largely gone by 2050”. Apart from this being just not so, the melting of all glaciers would add 60 centimetres to global sea level (ref), a lot more than in the worst-case scenario projected by semi-empirical models for 2050. And that contribution would be in addition to seawater expansion and melting of continental ice sheets. Perhaps a more important argument is that the semi-empirical method does not treat mountain glaciers separately from ice sheets, but considers all ice as a continuum.”

Paul A. T. Higgins et al (2002) – Dynamics of climate and ecosystem coupling: abrupt changes and multiple equilibria – Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 357:647–655 doi 10.1098/rstb.2001.1043“Emergent properties of coupled socio-natural systems add yet another layer of complexity to the policy debate. As a result, the social and economic consequences of possible global changes are likely to be underestimated in most conventional analyses because these nonlinear, abrupt and irreversible responses are insufficiently considered.”